(Not 3D Printer) Brushless motor questions!
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Just a thought, but that CAN port could mean the VESCs would play well with Duet 3!
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Brushless motors designed for airplanes are very small and light and take enormous current. The motor is cooled by the prop wash that it is creating, so yes, even a very small motor may be rated for 80-100W. If you look at the construction of the typical out-runner, the coils consist of just a few turns of wire which keeps inductance and resistance very low.
Wire current capacity is determined by the temperature rise and insulation material. They typically use silicone to insulate motor leads so the allowable temperature rise, and therefore current capacity, is much higher that it would be for a vinyl insulated wire.
The life of ball bearings spinning at 50k rpm is usually measured in hours.
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I would endorse the observation that RC brushless put scary amounts of current and power through scary small motors and wires, but only do it for very short periods of time.
However, my main observation is to return to the comment well up the thread "Assuming the bog-standard radio control model (RC) style speed controllers are purely open loop" - this is not necessarily a valid assumption. Even bog-standard brushless controllers can be quite intelligent and airborne ones often have a governor mode that tries to maintain a constant RPM even as load fluctuates - mainly used in helicopters to try and maintain a fixed head speed.
You could read the source: https://github.com/bitdump/BLHeli (but it's beyond me). BL-Heli and its derivatives are pretty high-spec brushless speed controller code targeting helicopter and drone usage and have varying degrees of open-source-ness.
Finally, I observe that if you're using controllers intended for propeller (or similar, eg rotors, fans, etc) applications, they don't necessarily reverse well - they might anticipate variable pitch and variable load, but they pretty much all assume they will only turn one way and some either won't reverse (without going through a reconfiguration process) or are slow (like, distinctly pause at stationary) to reverse direction.
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This will be in no way helpful to the OP (sorry @DocTrucker!), but I'm slowly trying to demystify the dizzying variety of 'brushless motor and ESC' choices for a small project I have; converting a kid's PowerWheels car. It originally came (it was a 'hedge find') with 6V battery (dead) and 550 motor (also seemingly dead), but I'd like to convert it to brushless for a bit more oomph, and fun. Torque and speed of brushless motors seems to be defined by the number of turns; 12T motors seem to be for speed, 60T (or more) for torque. I'm narrowing down the range of motor I need, but I'm completely at a loss with the ESC (not RC controlled, just an on/off throttle pedal, and ideally want one I can turn down while the little one gets used to it!), and to some extent the battery, to power it. I had considered a hoverboard conversion, but they're pretty expensive too. Any suggestions?
Ian
Cartesian bed-slinger with Duet 3 Mini 5+ WiFi and 1LC : RRP Fisher Delta v1 with Duet 2 Maestro : TronXY X5S with Duet 3 MB6HC and Roto toolboard
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@mrehorstdmd is your servo xperiment on your website or can I find it somewhere else? That sounds interesting. Is it an encoder problem or cog?
Cheers
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@QuintBrand The sand table stuff is here: https://drmrehorst.blogspot.com/2020/04/the-spice-must-flow-gets-servo-motors.html
I don't have anything written up on the 3D printer install yet, but there's a thread with some photos here: https://forum.duet3d.com/topic/17970/configuring-for-servomotors/13
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Thank you very much for sharing those links. Very very informative and very cool to see your application!
Your accuracy seems mainly bounded by the encoders die what I read and understand. Are you planning on getting new encoders?
Kind regards
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@QuintBrand I'm not 100% sure what the problem is yet- it may just involve tuning the driver parameters. I would not try to shoe-horn a different encoder into the motors- the driver firmware is written for the encoders that are there and it would take a miracle for some other randomly selected encoder to work with the existing driver/firmware. I can't even figure out how to tune the existing stuff, never mind trying to tune for a completely different piece of hardware.
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@droftarts Brushless motors tend to be high rpm motors. You're going to need some torque to push a kid around in a car, which means you'll need some gearing to reduce rpm and multiply the torque. Maybe you can pick up an old electric drill and use it with a bigger battery. It will have a gearbox built in, though maybe not sufficient for the moving masses involved.
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@droftarts Did you get any where with your project? If it's not resolved yet I found a fair few links on Brushless motor theory that helped me understand them a little better. There are many similarities with stepper motors, but also much confusion!
You can get some slow motors. Brusless tend to be specced by a constant that determines how many RPM the motor will reach per drive volt - Kv. So my little 5000 Kv motors are likely to reach up to 71,000rpm if unloaded. That's never going to be achieved as the torque is zero at this level, and I will be interested in finding out how close I get! There are other contstants such as the torque constant that help you understand what teh motor will be capable of, but the links will be far better at explaining that than me.
Many low Kv motors used in marine applications, some folk convert car alternators to brushless motors, and there is also people looking at open source speed controllers for things like electric skate boards etc.
I had a similar vehicle given to me by my inlaws who found it in the skip. Thankfully in my case it was just dead charger. I did think about rebuilding it to something better but the drive components just didn't look strong enough to take much else. I think I'll just go electric go-kart when my son's ready for a shared build!
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@DocTrucker haven’t progressed it, as my eldest (4) is about to start school, so it’s rather a busy time. I was inspired by this video: https://youtu.be/Ycfv3QIqvco where he ripped the motor, controller and battery out of an RC car. There’s a few other videos of similar swaps, just haven’t had time to go through them all! Thanks for the info, I’ll see if I can get further with it over once I get more time!
Ian
